


Phantom Touch

by vaguely_concerned



Series: Scoundrels and Thieves 'verse [24]
Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: M/M, Pining, young mchanzo
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-19
Updated: 2018-02-19
Packaged: 2019-03-21 10:26:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,290
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13738887
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vaguely_concerned/pseuds/vaguely_concerned
Summary: In which Hanzo daydreams. Set right after the beginning of the relationship.





	Phantom Touch

_Winter light washes in through the windows, pale and exhausted though dawn has only just broken. He can tell Jesse’s not asleep from the way he breathes but he lies very still, a pleasant grounding weight over Hanzo’s chest._

His father is speaking and around the table the rest of the family sit sullen, unconvinced seemingly both by his proposal and by his intentions in putting it forward. Hanzo waits for his father’s sign to do his part of the convincing, but he finds his mind floating off to somewhere else, a sailship idly adrift in the open waters of memory.

_He strokes his fingers through Jesse’s hair, still mussed and crazy from last night. Jesse hums and butts his head into the touch, curling closer against him. They’ve been awake for more than an hour but have barely moved, like the bed holds some phenomenal gravitational pull and they are helpless to resist. Their suitcases stand ready by the door, an unwelcome snag in Hanzo’s vision whenever he looks that way. Instead he anchors his gaze in other things; Jesse’s hat perched charmingly askew on a bedpost, their clothes merrily discarded in a joint pile on the floor, the light playing over the warm brown skin of Jesse’s shoulder. It always feels... odd, these times when doing nothing seems like the most important thing._

_The moment cannot be postponed forever, though. Steeling himself he glances over at the clock on the wall — he doesn’t say anything but feels Jesse tense against him like he knows anyway and sighs, wrapping his arms around him to get him even closer and brushing his lips over the top of his head. Jesse unwinds a little, fingers trailing over Hanzo’s chest in soft, meandering patterns._

_“Right-o. We should get goin'. I’ll help you get the car out,” he says, inclining his head towards the landscape outside the window where thick snow has buried everything, the driveway included. It’ll take some time to clear, especially since Jesse’s instinctual response to a pile of snow seems to be to start a snowball fight and Hanzo is not necessarily as above it as he would like to pretend._

_Jesse pushes up on an elbow and starts to swing his legs over the edge of the bed. The sight of his wild hair and the naked stretch of his back spurs Hanzo into action._

_“Wait,” he says, catching Jesse around the waist and pulling him back down, their legs tangling in the sheets. Jesse laugh-yelps in surprise, sprawled on his back and grinning up at Hanzo when he moves to lean their foreheads together._

_“Whoa, the hell kinda ambush was that?”_

_“The kind you really ought to see coming by now,” Hanzo sighs, mock-disappointed, running his foot down Jesse’s shin. “Have I taught you nothing?”_

_“Mostly you’ve taught me that having your limbs tied together behind your back is bad news,” Jesse says. They spar sometimes — more the kind of exuberant, boisterous rough-and-tumble play fights he would have with Genji when they were boys and less real training, of course, and with a tendency to devolve into a different kind of physical exertion once Hanzo’s self control has been sufficiently wrecked by touching a Jesse who is flushed and sweaty and giddy. But informative nonetheless. Like his father had taken him aside to tell him when he’d reached a certain age: you should always strive to ascertain the deadliness of the people around you, especially if you mean to have sex with them. (“Your mother would have murdered me in my sleep, should she ever have needed to,” he’d added, an unprecedented depth of fondness and respect in his voice. It had been a strange and instructive afternoon.)_

_There is nothing like discipline or any recognizable technique in the way Jesse fights — it is, unmistakably, the style of someone whose formative experience has been the nastier, quicker brand of bar fights — but that was what had set Hanzo’s heart at rest in the end: Jesse is unpredictable and surprisingly quick and way, way too smart to let a situation deteriorate into trading blows if he isn’t planning to wildly and creatively cheat. It’s gotten him this far. When Hanzo can’t be there to watch his back… that will do. And if Hanzo happens to teach him a few moves no one has ever_ explicitly _told him are not meant for outsiders, surely no one ever needs to know._

_Hanzo runs his hand down Jesse’s ribs. “Any complaints? I am open to constructive criticism on my teaching style.”_

_“Hell no,” Jesse says immediately. “In fact I’d like to pencil in another lesson sometime soon, I feel like I need some input on my kissing it better technique.”_

_“Ah. Then I fear I must disappoint you; you are a natural. I have nothing left to teach you.”_

_Jesse waggles his eyebrows. “Could always use the practice, though, right? One master to another sorta thing?”_

_“Better keep those skills honed,” Hanzo agrees, bumping their noses together._

_When Hanzo kisses him Jesse wraps an arm around his shoulders and holds on._

The conversation ebbs and flows, someone presenting an argument against the plan and his father calmly rebutting, but he hasn’t yet turned to Hanzo and so he waits.

_Despite the urgency — maybe because of it — it seems to last forever, an unfolding thrill of closeness and searching, deliberate touches, Hanzo’s skin singing under Jesse’s hands._

_Jesse moans quietly and parts his lips for him, trusting and thoughtless, and had Hanzo been a different man that would be the exact moment he’d elect to go ‘fuck the damn flight anyway’ and stay right here for another week. Instead he just gentles his lips and plants soft kisses against the corners of Jesse’s mouth, his upper lip, adding the barest scrape of teeth to hear him gasp. For a while they breathe close together and then, while Hanzo is still gathering the strength to pull away, Jesse opens his eyes and looks at him._

Someone brings up the subject of Genji and then immediately backtracks as the air in the room turns icy — few people are cut out not to crumble when Sojiro Shimada gives them _that_ look. Hanzo fiddles with the edge of his sleeve, a childish, silly gesture he outgrew a long time ago, but no one is watching him and his thoughts walk their own paths.

_The moment lingers. Then Jesse quirks a grin and runs a finger down the bridge of Hanzo’s nose. “Anyone ever tell you your face’s gonna freeze like that if you keep up the frowning?”_

_“A well known myth, and not even one of the more credible ones,” Hanzo scoffs, but feels his features gentle anyway. Jesse presses his lips to the spot between his brows where his frown lines apparently reside._

_“You callin’ my mother a liar?”_

_“Mhm. If her offspring is anything to go by,” Hanzo says, nosing at Jesse’s temple, “I would hazard she might take it as a badge of honor.”_

_A low chuckle; Jesse takes his hand, playing with it, studying the palm. “Hah. Busted. You know me too well.”_

_He sits up, not letting go of Hanzo’s hand. Hanzo pushes to his knees to match him. Their fingers twine together — Jesse runs his thumb lightly over the pulse in Hanzo’s wrist, looking down at their linked hands with an expression on his face Hanzo doesn’t know what to do with._

Tell me not to go _, Hanzo thinks, the thought a desperate blade stabbing through his mind._ Be unreasonable about it. Be bitter. Say something. _Anything would be easier to bear than the resignation, the ready acceptance. Just because he’ll never ask for it doesn’t mean he doesn’t deserve more than what Hanzo can give him, and the fact that he is kind about it makes it worse._

_Jesse glances up at him, gives his quick bright lopsided smile, and Hanzo’s heart soars and breaks all at once, all over again._

_“I…”_

_”Hey. Next time,” Jesse says, filling the space Hanzo’s cowardice leaves empty, ”let’s go somewhere warm. Somewhere with a beach. I’ve been working on some sweet surfing moves to woo you with and I ain’t got enough marketable skills to pass one up just like that.”_

_As so often with Jesse, Hanzo’s caught flat-footed by his own laughter. The mental image of Jesse riding the waves in nothing but loudly patterned broadshorts and his ever-present hat, potentially smoking a cigarette the whole time, is as compelling as it is hilarious. (Perhaps a hair more on the compelling side, he amends, remembering all the times he’s seen Jesse fresh from the shower, water running down his chest, the small of his back, clinging to his eyelashes.)_

_”Oh wow, ouch,” Jesse says, pretending to wince even as his eyes glitter. ”Right in the ego.”_

_”No, no,” Hanzo manages. ”Trust me, I am looking forward to this already. Consider me thoroughly wooed in advance.”_

_”Yeah?”_

_With his free hand Hanzo reaches up and tucks Jesse’s hair away from his forehead, running the backs of his fingers down his cheek_ — _Jesse lets his head fall into the touch. ”Hm. Just in general.”_

_Jesse gives a breath of laughter, a pleased flush rising in his cheeks. ”Got you fooled somehow, huh?”_

_”I refuse to hear that indirect slight against my impeccable judgement,” Hanzo says lightly. He squeezes Jesse’s hand, wishing he knew how to reach the parts of him that say things like that and put them to rest. ”A beach would be nice, though. I will never complain about you being wet and half naked.”_

_The flush deepens a little; when Hanzo cups his cheek in his palm Jesse bites his lip and closes his eyes, leaning into it. After a while he mumbles: ”We should hurry, it’s almost eight. And here I am not even having had my first cigarette yet. I feel barely decent.”_

_Hanzo makes a sound of reluctant agreement but doesn’t make to move. He brushes the corner of Jesse’s mouth with his thumb. ”Call me,” he says, impulsively. ”When you get back. Or... just whenever you want. If I cannot talk when you do, I will call you up when I get a moment. I can usually be alone at night, when there is nothing special planned.”_

_Eyes opening, Jesse looks at him with what seems like sympathy. Hanzo doesn’t understand why, but neither is he offended like he usually would be. ”Sure. Every night, if you want, I’m real good at talkin’ nonsense for a while if I got nothin’ new to say.”_

(Yes, _Hanzo can’t quite bring himself to say, because it’s weak and impractical and preposterous. He’s never noticed how much silence there is in his life before._ Please.)

_”Whenever you get the chance and inclination,” he shrugs, instead._

_”Hey, it’s a deal.” Jesse lifts their joined hands to his face, smiling. Hanzo finds it a little hard to breathe all of a sudden. ”Next time, then.”_

“Hanzo.”

_Jesse kisses his wrist very gently, and doesn’t ask him to stay._

“Hanzo,” his father says, a sharpness in his voice suggesting he’s had to repeat himself. Hanzo wrenches himself back into the here and now with a jerk.

“Yes. Yes, of course. I, hm — ” He finds his place again, speaks his lines when he’s supposed to and listens when he’s not, and gets away with it with nothing but a few raised eyebrows around the table, but the shame burns hot in his gut at being caught out; just because his mistake wasn’t punished this time doesn’t mean he didn’t make a mistake in the first place. His father doesn’t give him another look, though, neither for condemnation nor clemency, so perhaps his slip-up wasn’t quite as egregious as it felt.

 _Pay. Attention,_ he barks at himself, at the sheer frivolousness of the reverie. It’s a flippant, buoyant kind of dreaminess, though, untroubled by the admonishment, impossible to keep down no matter what he tries. Even though it’s profound, irresponsible stupidity.   

Because he knows, with cold clarity, under his pride and self-delusions — nothing this good lasts. You don’t get to be this kind of contented without having to pay for it at some point. Sooner or later there will be a choice: to be himself or to be happy, and that will be that. It’s not hard to see, even now, that he’s not really meant for this, the way his heart brims over betraying his prosaic nature, revealing his chest as the singularly unfitting vessel it is, ill-designed for containing the sheer immensity of what he is feeling.

And yet knowing that Jesse will call him tonight is all that’s needed to fill his stomach with enough butterflies to keep an army of lepidopterists happily occupied for a lifetime. He’s not used to feeling _young_ , has always taken pride in being one step ahead, mature beyond his years, the dependable one, impossible to disappoint because he has no illusions to be disabused of. But now it’s like he has grown fresh nerves under his skin, tender and new to the touch like the veins of sapling leaves.

He was always resigned to the hurt; he hadn’t counted on joy being the harder force to live with.  

The conversation flows ponderously towards its conclusion and his father seems pleased enough with the results — or at least he doesn’t see much use in pressing for more than what he’s already got; at any rate he doesn’t enlist Hanzo’s support further. For another while he gets to be hidden in plain sight, unwatched.

_Next time._

Under the table Hanzo touches the inside of his wrist with his fingertips and bites his lip to hide the smile.

**Author's Note:**

> I would like everyone to know what I was having *such* a shit day when the Summer Games event dropped in 2017 – and then I saw McCree’s lifeguard skin and laughed, no exaggeration, for fifteen minutes straight. It was a good, holy-shit-I-think-I’ve-fucked-up-something-in-my-lung night after that. Thank you, Jesse McCree, for being out there savin’ lives and lookin’ good/ridiculous.
> 
> Also, to twist that knife a little: after a few years of them being together Hanzo started to honestly believe that maybe they could pull it off and it might not all go to hell after all... and then the first fic in this series happened. (...I regret everything & nothing simultaneously)


End file.
